Happened to be the company founder's surname.

For a device that ONLY produces sound touted as such a re-vo-lu-tio-na-ry device this is a massive marketing failure.

Just ride/drive a bit more thoughtfully so you don't hurt people, even if they're deaf.

That's such a beautiful statement

Maybe the issue is the noise in the cities?

[0] https://xkcd.com/1217/

No. There are just people who will walk on a designated bicycle lane because they haven't seen the signage, are ignorant or careless about it, or will just cross it to get somewhere else. All while wearing ANC headphones. This isn't about bothering someone, but warning them. It's really no different from someone jaywalking without seeing you, and honking to make them aware of that. Or are you supposing you'd just break and wait until they're finished crossing the street?

Guess why I wear noise cancelling headphones on trains? Because of the excessive announcements!

(I mean seriously excessive. Because in the UK the answer to everything is to create another announcement or poster)

We need to stop the arms race

[0] https://cdn.skoda-storyboard.com/2026/04/Skoda-DuoBell-Resea...

A loud voice travels very well through car windows at short distances, even for big soundproof vehicles.

That will eliminate the bulk of traffic “accidents” involving bicycle and pedestrian; it’s expected and common to do this in the Netherlands.

It doesn't make sense for a car driven to use headphones, so not sure why it'd make sense for other vehicle-users to use them either, as you say, we really do use our ears to help navigate traffic so allowing people to be so careless seems... Careless?

I wear these things because traffic is too noisy though. Assholes with super loud motorbikes or mopeds in particular, cars aren't the worst.

The Air Zound is wonderful. You can get pedestrians' attention with light toots. I reserve the full blast for developing danger or people who didn't get the message from the toots.

Survival depends on being heard in a car with closed windows with possible loud radio or squabbling kids.

I'm legally blind, so I have my own bias here, but I think people really over-rely on sight. If you do want to listen to something while walking around a city, I can highly recommend bone conduction headphones, that keep your ears unblocked.

It's also so nice to know I can put it away and not worry about finding it a year later with the battery I forgot to remove having exploded

Was mowing the lawns the other day and could still hear the high pitched tones it emits even with noise cancelling headphones on.

Situation is pretty lame because I liked the foxes sleeping in the garden, super fun to take photos of them and they don't do much harm.

Bell sound starts at 2:09 in the video.

Of course they would, because a lot of them either don’t have any bell, or have a shitty ping-ping bell that doesn’t produce good sound.

Meanwhile... you apparently can't buy this thing anywhere.

Interestingly, all the shrillness noises (chalkboard, balloon or polystyrene screech) are in similar frequency too.

But cyclists can ride in the pedestrian lane, bike lanes and pedestrians lanes are not easily distinguishable (if you are visiting a new city/country for example, and/or the painting of the lanes disappear over time) compared to roads, you typically can hear cars/motorbikes coming (though with electric cars that’s less common) while bikes are very silent, and last but not least, typically there is certain hierarchy when it comes to cars and pedestrians (at least in Europe): pedestrians come first. That’s not the case with bikes (which based on my experience, they share the same level of importance with pedestrians in the streets)

On a serious note there’s a marketing problem in my view: who out there who chooses to buy a bell even considers that their might be a loudness problem? It’s not immediately obvious that I need this and I’m sure there’s a premium price attached.

My regular Widek bell penetrates ANC, but when there’s music, ANC or not, it’s hard to hear. I’m struggling to believe the claims this bell is going to be significantly better.

Left side is for bicycles. Right side for pedestrians. It is a dedicated lane but a shared space.

Huh? Germany has signs on same shared pavements that tell you that by law your bike needs to be on there, not on the road.

Are you suggesting people break the law over your preferences?

The winters were rough though.

Aside from idiots with cars, it's relaxing. Only some of my route was on the road, though.

Like the other poster says … The winters were rough though. I just didn't bike, though my coworker kept trying to get me to.

My point was more that I've seen product demos where parts of a product were presented as having been pored over painstakingly when in reality it was decided on day one that it would work that way. However, because it's a prominent feature, it feels cheap to show the reality, so I get that for demos there's a bit of storytelling that goes into it so the audience feels like it was a revelation.

For UX that I've designed myself, I have definitely found that a lot of the great ones required a ton of iteration and almost "courage" to go against my initial bright ideas and look at things from a different perspective. It often required taking away elements that I thought were absolutely required at first but later realized made more sense to go without. If someone were to look at the final result, they would definitely think "Well, obviously that's how it should work." But more likely they'd have go through a similar journey that I did to come up with it if they hadn't seen the solution.

In a way it's like finding out how a magic trick worked. It's only obvious in retrospect.

That's the problem with user interface design as a career. It takes a lot of effort to create simple to understand and simple to use design, and then when users see them, they see it is simple and think it must have been easy to do. Most programmers tend to make programs for themselves and other technical people and has horrible design. The classic corollary example I like is when Apple came up with MP3 players and marketed as 'It can hold 1000 songs' instead of the current marketing at the time 'It has has 1GB of storage'. Technical folks would not be satisfied with 1000 songs becuase they would be doing back of the math calculations on how low of a bitrate you have to get, in order to fit 1k songs in a given space... while the other 95% of the population doesn't want to do any math, and if even if they did, they don't know.. or at least back then, didn't know what a GB was, or how many megabytes an MP3 consumed....

I say small but I mean tiny. One of those that are sound only, no visuals.(Why are those even a thing?)

It works surprisingly well if the car isn't moving quickly. Cars aren't as sound isolating as you'd think. My main use-case is that a car is stopped at an intersection, or crossing my lane so they can turn, and I'm worried they'll pull out and hit me because they're looking the wrong way focused on car traffic, and in these situations they almost always hear my bell.

I regularly cycle on a very narrow shared use pavement which is directly beside a 40mph road. There is space to pass pedestrians, but I would consider it dangerous to try and pass without ensuring they are aware of my presence, even when passing at a walking pace.

A chime of the bell is more of a polite "I'm here" instead of a "Get out of my way!"

For the same reason I try to be courteous and try to always say "hello, thank you, have a nice day" even if sometimes I am fuming inside that someone cut my path and I had priority from a legal point of view. I also quietly slow down and give ample distance to someone who cross the street when I am driving even when it is a stupid decision from their part and others would have honked or shouted insults.

I don't think our life and interactions should always be a case of us vs them.

Reminds me of a good line from Starman…

Tho I like the proposal to require that manufacturers design car horns to sound as loudly inside the cabin as outside. Might make a dent.

And of course there will always be fringe cases. What if I go to sleep with regular foam earplugs, what if I take a sleeping pill etc. Or what if the warning sound can't be engineered to fit a ANC friendly frequency, like somebody screaming, a car tire screech behind me and so on.

I myself pretty much never honk. I understand honking makes sense on narrow bendy roads like in the mountains, where you need to alert the drivers behind the corner, but I don't see any other legitimate reasons to be honest.

Paths where pedestrians and bikers (and other light transportation vehicles) are mixed are overwhelmingly common.

That is an unfortunate, probably experimental?, traffic design choice...

Jaywalking is even a misdemeanor in some areas of the USA, it doesn't stop it from happening at all.

I don’t actually mind people doing that though. What is annoying is the entitled attitude that there should be no consequence for that choice, and everyone else should orbit/compensate around their lack of situational awareness.

This was developed especially for use in backup heavy environments like harbors where workers started ignoring constant beeps.

Motorcyclists are invisible. Never rely on others seeing you, ride as if they're an obstacle you have to navigate.

You can hide a whole truck behind the A-pillar of modern cars, let alone a motorcycle. At certain angles, human eyes have complete blind spots that we're not aware of because our brain filters them out. Motorcycles fit perfectly into those.

Never hover in people's blind spots. Pass quickly or stay back. Do not drive parallel with another vehicle. Goes for cars too.

When approaching another car perpendicularly (like an intersection), remember that humans lose depth perception because their nose covers one of the eyes. A driver literally cannot tell how far you are. Our usual proxy is the distance between headlights. Motorcyles have 1 headlight so this heuristic doesn't work, but we don't realize that it doesn't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x94PGgYKHQ0

This is neither customarily nor regulatory uniform. There are mixed-use trails near me where bells are required. There are some trails where most people use a bell, some trails where nobody uses a bell, and some where there is a mix.

In my personal experience, the ratio of bikes to pedestrians and the purpose of the trail greatly affects how people tend to handle this.

I have a pair of Hunt wheels and they work fantastically, bonus points because they are “always on”, pedestrians are aware of them, but are never surprised.

Note that the worst kind of canal towpath cyclist is the one who slows to a crawl and creeps behind me for minutes sometimes unnoticed, biding their time for a passing spot with lots of space. Just ring the frigging bell and I will stand out of your way for the 3 seconds it takes you to get by!

Honestly, I prefer that over those damn electric scooters. Most people who ride them are complete morons. They don't pay attention, ride into traffic, go at high speeds and don't care about anyone except themselves. I’ve even been hit by one.

Of course, ringing my bell will often cause people to veer into the way, too. But then if you ring at a sufficient distance, you risk them not hearing it. Except there's no way to tell if they're not hearing it, or just consciously not veering into the way, and in the latter case, you don't want to ring again, because that will sound even more impatient.

Etiquette is hard.

(And yes, I want cars to have a bicycle bell too, so they can greet people without jump-scaring me.)

I ring a very nice bell and can "mute" the bell (touching it with my hand to stop the ring just after thumbing the striker), so when ringing for information rather than hazard, it's a short quick ring, rather than a long loud ring.

Signs here alert cyclists to warn when passing, so certainly this etiquette is considered normal, but also I imagine it is not universal to all regions.

Also in Sweden, you do only use the bell if really needed.

In other countries rings now seem either unnecessary (they have enough space) or rude (I'm not on bike lane, why do you demand me to give you a way).

One small victory at a a time...

If you are running a red light at 15mph on a bicycle, dodging pedestrians, you are just an asshole - maybe you're slightly less dangerous than an SUV running a red light, but it is still completely not okay.

There are dumb teenagers, which is one thing, but the aggressive "well, we're not emitting carbon, so we can do whatever we want crowd" is probably even more crappy and dangerous, since they're deliberate about it, and more present in areas with lots of pedestrians.

More info: https://hackaday.com/2023/02/07/all-about-usb-c-manufacturer...

My bell just gives me the significant improvement of possibly getting a reaction from the pedestrian long before I need to start braking.

However, not everybody does cycle like that. And while legally and ethically dubious, the bell still helps in that case as well.

How? That seems like it would be rather mechanically challenging.

Pedestrians regularly wave acknowledgement or even say "thank you." Some other cyclists (especially on e-bikes) just blast by with no warning.

What would you suggest cyclists do until that happens? Never go faster than walking speed? Then I can leave my bike at home. Cycle on the road, where cars can hit me, instead of the dedicated bike lane, use of which is often mandatory?

> a court is really not going to take this line of reasoning very well

A court will rule in favor of the pedestrian stepping onto a bike lane without looking getting hit by a bike that's too close to do anything?

This could serve as the blueprint I guess, skip to the part about the 70s and 80s protests. Collective and popular protests helped by an oil crisis, recognizing vested interests in other modes of transportation (cars) that might want to work against your efforts.

Maybe none of this way apparent to you, despite it being plainly written out in simple English, because... I don't know actually. Can you explain your failure to read?

That's a huge assumption, and likely incorrect.

IIRC these came out in the early-mid 90s; a bike messenger trick at the time was to fasten the horn to your handlebars with velcro, so you could take it off and hold it near a car window when triggering it.

The OP seemed to suggest that people wearing ANC headgear should stop doing so, but both the bell and the ANC-wearing pedestrians are a non-issue in my lived experience.

It would be a shame if these "cyclist-pedestrian ANC-wars" distract from the real issue, that cyclists are not, but should be, a fully emancipated participant in traffic and infrastructure should be designed with cars (to a degree), bicyclists AND pedestrians in mind.

They usually do. (The considerate and/or non-confrontational ones. There are always idiots, and people have the tendency to remember negative outliers and project their behavior on the group as a whole, which is unfortunate.) However, slowing down isn't the whole story. Riding a non-motorized bicycle is much easier if the rider can keep moving, however slowly, so it would be considerate in turn for the pedestrian to step aside and let the cyclist pass, if possible. A distracted pedestrian can be warned by a bell.

Separately, delivery riders as a category have an incentive to ride as quickly as possible, which is a recipe for conflict. Removing that incentive means removing or completely reimagining the service. I don't think that anybody has a solution or mitigation at present.

I’m not sure arguing against a bell is helpful - people need to look on any road, especially with the advent of quiet electric cars.

I have very little time for people who freely absolve themselves of their personal responsibility to be aware of their surroundings and we shouldn't be encouraging people to zone out of society just so they can consume more.

I am comfortable cycling slower than walking pace and if I am in a real rush for speed I will cycle on the road but sometimes pedestrians can cause serious cycling accidents even when you're careful or slow.

I've lost count of the times I've been riding at walking pace behind someone, on a shared path, waiting to get past because they're completely oblivious to the bell ringing, politely asking, or even flashing lights.

May I ask where you are riding? I am currently in Bavaria. The danger level is usually higher after the winter. Drivers need to re-accustom themselves to sharing the road with two wheeled riders.

Evasive action could be even more dangerous in cities. In my experience being able to come to a stop without hitting anything is even better.

Lot's of dead people had the right of way. Ride safe, I agree. I also had 0 accidents so far in 30 years. But you still experience new things you hadn't thought would be an issue.

I sometimes do that. It helps not having music that could be described as aggressive. I often use reggae.

However it means you need a speaker charged so it is not something I have ready everytime I use my bicycle, nor do I want to carry it everyday when leaving the bike attached somewhere so it can't be the goto solution.

IMO if I'm in a dense pedestrian zone and I can't go around people and I can't communicate by voice, it means I'm going too fast.

Of course this requires compensating for the loss in awareness through hearing by looking more diligently before crossing a bike lane, but unfortunately, some people never learn this, or only through a few close calls.

"Annoyingly" ringing a bell and converting a potential accident into a close call seems pretty close to optimal to me.

Other things like loudness levels inside cars cannot be monitored without going in full totalitarian mode.

Safe or not - it is up to individual to decide if it is worth the risk.

I used to live in a city where I would walk everywhere but I had the constant fear of cyclists running over me because they would drive all over the pavements without any regard for pedestrians. Imagine walking and having to look around all the time. I find it amusing how people in websites like this one talk about how we have to be very afraid of cars when the true terror, at least for me, were cyclists.

Which is kind of how it has worked with cars, except I find that more and more cars have a style of horn that's hard to control with the necessary precision. Maybe this is Canadian culture but I get very anxious that my horn will honk for a millisecond too long and the poor victim will think I'm angry at them.

It feels dangerous to be unable to see the driver through their side window (eg. 4-way stop eye contact on who goes)

Now that I moved to the country with a comprehensive rails-to-trail network, I thank all the cyclists that use the bell to let me know they're coming up behind me. What really irks me is the dudes going 30+mph silently coming up behind me, passing less than 2' from my dog (who is at my side) when there's PLENTY of room to give me space. No, we can't hear them coming all the time. Yes, it's startling, rude, and dangerous for all of us.

Which, IMO is important. Even if they aren't in your way, it can help avoid an accident. If you're on any sort of nicer, well maintained road bike, it's going to be near silent. I've startled pedestrians on mine, so I now ring my bell every time I'm approaching someone, not as a "get out of my way" signal but more of a "hey! I'm coming up behind you, don't get startled and jump into my path"

Generally though, if its a particularly crowded path, I just ride in the road. In stop and go city traffic I'm usually going as fast if not faster than traffic anyway.

On the other hand, I've been angered by dog owners when running who just take up the entire pavement. A couple of weeks ago, I had one guy coming towards me force me to come to a complete stop when I was running flat out, because he couldn't be bothered to control his dogs. He was in the centre of the pavement, and the 2 dogs were at the extreme edges with tight enough leads between him and the dogs, so it'd have tripped me up if I'd tried to jump them. He knew full well I was heading that way, but in the 10 seconds since we had made eye contact, he was clearly determined not to reign his dogs in, and it was only when I was stopped and so he had to reign them in to continuing walking past that I was able to keep using the pavement.

As far as the pedestrian's safety is concerned what matters is either giving them a wide berth or slowing right down when passing.

Whether on a bike or not I'm sick of all the modern world's beeping and ringing and buzzing and blaring and if I'm wearing noise cancelling headphones that means I don't want to hear it. Don't tell you're being annoying for my own good because you aren't.

Not mandatory and at your own risk IMO, but as a simple thought exercise on your argument, answer me this: if a car hits you on your bike or another cyclists knocks you off your bike and your head hits the concrete/kerb, are you gonna escape better off from the accident with or without wearing a helmet?

Spoiler alert from my GFs sister who works at an ER in Austria: helmeted patients walk away without permanent brain injury which she can't say the same for those involved in accidents without helmets. Helmets saving lives isn't a lobby issue, it's a medical fact.

People telling you to not wear a helmet because it somehow reduces safety through some convoluted spaghetti argument, must be off their rockers, when they clearly save lives at impacts. That's like saying governments should be against mandatory seatbelts and airbags in cars because their added safety encourages a cycle of unsafe driving leading to more accidents, and that without them divers would be forced to drive more carefully and lead to more safety.

It's perfectly fine to militate for the utopia of building of safe cycling infrastructure everywhere for everyone, but please let's not unnecessarily put people's lives at risk by promoting this FUD that helmets don't increase safety, just so people can literally die on this hill.

By all means, each individual should do of course as they see fit according to their desired risk profile of where they live and how they want to live their lives, just don't ask others to put their lives in danger in order to emulate the lifestyle where you live where the risks for not wearing a helmet are much smaller.

Which was my entire point. City wide infrastructure rehauls were massively easier and cheaper back then than today. The amount of nimbyism and red tape has ballooned exponentially in that time span, let alone the cost. Even NL wouldn't be able to do that today if they wanted to had it not done that in the 70s.

They for sure have time for that. When I drive my car can't use that as an excuse.

Even when you "actually want to get somewhere"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r8f3w89XeM

(watch out, there's a lot of extra stuff in this video about the machine they use to measure efficiency)

I am pretty sure most people don't realize it but they are inconciously attracted to it. It just feels better walking on it.

The most problematic people in traffic are never aware that they are the problem.

If you listen carefully you can usually hear a cyclist behind you who may want to pass or is passing you, and having headphones probably makes that a lot harder

I've taught my kids when crossing the street to make eye contact with drivers to make sure they see you. Drivers with smartphones unfortunately add to the challenge.

Get off the bike on the side opposite of the dog and keep the bike between you and the dog just in case, if you are afraid.